Conference thebay::joyoflex

    P.S. 
    
    I always figured that the reason my friend's name was Flewelling and
    not Llewelyn was because this was the way some illiterate ancestor of
    his had pronounced it to someone at Ellis Island or someplace like
    that.
    

    Just because Welsh uses the same letters, it is a totally different
    language and you aren't mapping sounds and characters.
    
    The English names (like Cardiff) are transliterations of the Welsh
    names in approximately the similar acceptable sound in English.
    
    For example the double d (dd) in Welsh sounds similar to the "th"
    in "with", but the English can't cope with the sound, so they
    converted it to an "f" sound.  Why Cardiff has a double "f" I'm
    not sure but it might be something to do with the olde english use
    of "f" as "s".
    
    In Llewelyn, the "ll" sound is not "fl" at all and is pronounced by
    the English as simply "l".  In Welsh the "ll" sound is like an
    aspirated gutteral sound similar to the "ch" at the end of Bach,
    followed by am "l".  But again, there is no English sound.  Some
    English, have adopted the "ll" as "fl" and produced "flewelyn",
    but it is NOT a unique and not universal transliteration.
    
    Wales (Cymru) is pronounced like "kumree", "y" sounding like "u",
    and the "u" like "ee". (the y is somewhere betwee "u" and "oo" in
    actuality ... again a sound the English have trouble with)
    
    Dyfedd is pronouced as Duveth ... "y" as "u" as above, "f" as "v",
    "dd" as the th in with (not the hard curt with but the softer
    extended form of with.)
    
    Does that help ?
    
    Stuart

    Carmarthen as "Caerfyrddin"
    
    Caerfyrddin
    
    aer -> air like in cairn
    f   -> v
    y   -> u
    dd  -> th
    
    Which gives Cairvurthin ... which in all honesty sounds like
    someone drunk on scrumpy (alcoholic rough cider!)  might try
    pronouncing Carmarthen!  Nothing in the Welsh name transliterates
    to "m", but it's a bit of license!
    
    try the wonderful (and I can't remember it all, but it;s somewhere
    in here!) Llanfair.... gogogogoch) which is phenomenal length and
    impossible to do justice to pronounce.
    
    Stuart

    	You should also remember that there are different accents and
    dialects. It is no more likely that a Welsh speaker from South Wales
    and a Welsh speaker from North Wales would pronounce a word the same
    way, than it is in the U.S. that a Bostonian would pronounce a word the
    same way as a Texan.
    
    	In fact Cornish was recognised as a separate language from Welsh,
    though it is only separated from Wales by the tens of miles wide Severn
    estuary.
    
    	In Wales the signposts are bilingual. They always give the Welsh 
    place name, and the English version may be either a translation from
    the Gaelic or a transliteration that gives some approximation to the
    sound in English.
    
    	As a comparison, you can consider that while Paris is spelt that
    way on French maps, maybe it should be spelt Parree on English maps,
    but the English would still not pronounce it quite right.

    I was told that "ll" is roughly "thl".
    
    One useful thing, "w" is pronounced like a double-u, "uu".
    
    						Ann B.

    	Probably just the dialect version I heard, but tongue to roof of
    mouth in same position as for an English "l", but then breathe out
    rather than voicing it. The voicing starts with the change to the
    following vowel. With an English speaker, for "llan", probably "thlan",
    "lan", "clan" are all equally bad approximations to a Welsh ear.

"ll" can be formed by opening your mouth slightly, and pulling your tongue
to the back of your throat and exhale gently .... you produce a sound like
the last of the gutteral sound of  Bach (and don't pronouce it like batch,
or back!).  Other ways of forming the sound are approximations for people
who dislike or cannot form the gutteral sound ... hence fl or thl ...
both are produced like so many other english sounds, in the front of the
mouth near the teeth, where the 'll' sound comes from the back of the
throat.

If you can produce the sound, it works so much easier than the transliteral
soundings like thl of fl.  

Stuart

    Is Welsh related to Gaelic?
    
    ed

In as much as it is one of the Celtic laguages, yes ... but it is like
comparing say Dutch and German ... they are both a Germanic language but
that's about as close as it gets!

Stuart

    	As far as I know, there are 4 languages extant with the same roots:
    Gaelic, Erse, Welsh and Breton. The last person to have Cornish as a
    mother tongue died about 200 years ago. A little north of here, in the
    Southern Alps, there were the Ligurian Celts, but the Romans went to a
    lot of trouble to exterminate them, and you can still see the monument
    erected by Augustus Caesar to his success at La Turbie, about 40 miles 
    from here. I don't know of any record of their language.
    
    	I believe Gaelic and Erse are fairly closely related, and Welsh,
    Breton and Cornish belong to a somewhat different group. I have heard
    all 5 languages referred to as "Gaelic" and then distinguished as
    "Scots Gaelic", "Welsh Gaelic", "Irish Gaelic",...
    
    	There are a couple of television channels that broadcast
    exclusively in Welsh, and the Irish government strongly encourages the
    use of Erse. I don't know of similar efforts with the others.

    Re Breton and Cornish
    
    Having taken holidays in successive years in Cornwall and Brittany, I
    was often struck by similarities: for example, the place-name St Brieuc
    (in Brittany) obviously maps to the name of a Cornish church I saw -
    Saint Br* [I didn't remember it _that_ well, might have been Breek].
    
    I wonder how dead is dead (in languages). I know the last person to
    have Cornish as a mother tongue died about 200 years ago (I've seen
    the old lady's grave-stone). But I wonder if that's enough to make
    it `dead'. In theory, a language whose last native speaker has died
    could be passed down (say by that native speaker's children, who learnt
    it from their parent as a second language) to a new-born baby (who,
    from birth, hears nothing else). I'm not saying that has happened
    with Cornish, it just strikes me as a theoretical possibility; when
    I - as a student of linguistics in the 70s - glibly said `oh, that
    one's dead', I wasn't alive to the possibility that maybe a `dead'
    language can be resurrected (without book-learning rearing its ugly
    head anywhere along the line).
    
    
    Re -ll-
    
    The most helpful description I've met of the -ll- consonant is:
    take a /KL/ sound; drop the closure of the /K/ but keep the
    fricative bit that joins the /K/ and the /L/.
    Your mileage may differ.
    
    b

    The Wall Street Journal reported on some families which were
    trying to make Cornish a living tongue again--they had studied
    it as adults and spoke only Cornish to their children.  The oldest
    child was about six, I think.  This process can work--it did for
    Hebrew, for example.
    
    Manx is another Celtic language (spoken on the Isle of Man).  It
    was on the verge of extinction a few years ago (when the Guiness
    Book of Records claimed Manx was the living language with the
    smallest number of speakers, namely one).
    
    We have records of Gaulish and other Continental Celtic languages,
    from the Classic period, but not very good ones.  We have lots of
    medieval records of Welsh and Gaelic.  Celtic is a division of 
    the Indo-European language family, a relative of Italic and more
    distantly of Germanic and Illyric, etc.
    
    There are two main divisions of Celtic: Q-Celtic and P-Celtic, so
    named because where a word in one will have a Q, the corresponding
    word in the other will have a P.  Welsh, ancient British, Breton
    and (I think) Cornish are/were P-Celtic; Irish and Scots Gaelic 
    and others are/were Q-Celtic.  I don't know the status of Manx.
    
    Celtic languages have "samdhi", or alternation: the root of a word
    may start with a "P" in some environments, in an "F" in others, in
    "M" in yet others.  Historically this is due to environmentally
    condititioned phonetic change.
    
    Breton is the result of a settlement of British-speakers fleeing
    Germanic invaders in the 400's, not a descendant of Gaulish.
    
    		-John Bishop, BA in Lingistics, 1975

>    Manx is another Celtic language (spoken on the Isle of Man).  It
>    was on the verge of extinction a few years ago (when the Guiness
>    Book of Records claimed Manx was the living language with the
>    smallest number of speakers, namely one).

I think it was more than a few years ago.  I remember a comment made by
Robert Fowkes, professor of Germanic Languages and Linguistics at NYU,
when I was in college in the early '70s.  He had just received a book
entitled "Conversational Manx" and he remarked that the last native
speaker had died.

    Re .12
    
    >There are two main divisions of Celtic: Q-Celtic and P-Celtic, so
    >named because where a word in one will have a Q, the corresponding
    >word in the other will have a P.
    
    So if you don't care which Celtic you speak, you *don't* have to
    mind your P's and Q's?

    Re .12
    
    Two points: 
    
    1: I knew of the success of `resurrecting' Hebrew. I believe they did
    (or are trying) the same with Galician. But that's why I mentioned book
    learning in .11. I can see a theoretical distinction between learning a
    language by formal methods and then imparting it to an infant as a
    first language (on the one hand) and acquiring a language as a second
    language, but informally, from a native speaker, and then imparting it
    to an infant. In the first instance the artificially-generated first
    language may have characteristics (mistakes, misapprehensions, false
    generalizations, over-simplifications, paradigms derived by false
    analogy, and so on)  introduced by philological interference while the
    language was quiescent. This is not to say that the language is somehow
    not a language, but the question is whether the influences brought to
    bear on it (making it change as all natural languages do) are of the
    same sort as the ones operating on a language that has been currently
    spoken as a first language ever since it became distinguishable as a
    language. 
    
    2: One of the more obvious signs of the P-Celtic/Q-Celtic distinction
    is in patronyms: Price is a Welsh name derived from the son-of particle
    `ap' and the name Rhys; there is an equivalent Irish name Grice - I've
    no idea what the R-name may have been, but the particle in Irish Gaelic
    was presumably something like aq or ak.
    
    b
    

    re .15
    
    I agree: in particular, odd phonology might not survive the
    transition through books, unless those books are extremely 
    precise on articulation, as the Sanskrit texts are.
    
    Consider the Hebrew sibilants sin, shin, samekh: how does a
    re-creator know how to pronounce them?  As far as I know, it's
    only the existence of Arabic and Aramaic as related languages
    which did not die out that hints that samekh was pharyngealized,
    but for all we know it was really retroflexed or palatalized or
    affricated or nondistinct from the others.
    
    Galician?  Which language is that?  Is it a Celtic language from
    Classic times or a Romance language from the Middle Ages?  I 
    didn't think there was any significant grammar or vocabulary 
    from the pre-Celtic Iberians, not even enough to determine the
    linguistic family Iberian was in.
    
    		-John Bishop

Many names are derived from the 'ap' son-of prefix ... 

Powell was ap-Howell viz son of Howell.

Stuart

    Galician, as a language, is a language of the north west corner of the
    Iberian peninsula, closely related to Portuguese.
    
    Nick

    One the five main Iberian languages: (roughly W-E) Galician, Leonese,
    Castilian, Aragonese, Catalan. (Castilian was the lucky one in the
    middle; Philip II (or maybe I, I forget) got his cartographers
    to pick a good place for a capital, and they suggested Madrid
    (at the time a one-horse town with no resources to speak of and
    no claim to fame) because it was in more-or-less the exact geographic
    center of Philip's kingdom.
    
    These five languages cover the northern half of the Iberian  peninsula.
    I don't believe the south of the peninsula had time to evolve a
    distinctive Romance vernacular (earliest text known as the Peregrinatio
    - a travelogue written by a fifth-century nun) before the Moors
    arrived. Which is not to say that there isn't, today, a distinctive
    Andalucian dialect.
    
    b

    Where did the Castilian lisp come from?  I learned my Spanish from
    Madrile�os and I get odd looks from Latinoamericanos.  They usually end
    up saying something like, "that's the best Castellano, but nobody in
    the new world talks that way".
    
    Refresher:  in Castilian Spanish (and the name of the language around
    the world is Castellano, not Espa�ol), the c and z are pronounced like
    the English th.  In the rest of el mundo castellano, the c and z are
    pronounced like English s.
    
    Interestingly, in both English and Spanish, the word lisp (ceceo) is
    pronounced with a lisp if you have one and without a lisp if you don't.
    

    Isn't there the old phonological story that there was some Spanish King
    with a lisp, and all his courtiers had to affect a lisp so that they
    wouldn't offend His Majesty?  Any truth to that??  
    
    (I imagine this is now the 59th time that this FAQ is asked, and will
    be answered, in this very file...)
    

    Ah, right.  Did you say it's offensive if you *do* mock His Majesty
    or it's offensive if you *don't*?  Oh, you don't remember either?
    Guess wrong and we die.....

    Re .20.

    There are two issues here: ceceo (the one most people know about) and
    the way madrile�os (other Spaniards too, but not Catalans, I think, who
    mostly speak castellano as a second language) pronounce /s/ - the 
    `apical' S. A real S (spelt `s') is usually (in most of Spain, not in
    Latin America, and seldom by people who learnt castellano at college)
    articulated with the tip of the tongue rather than the blade of the
    tongue. When Dan mentioned the tip of his tongue he was nearer the mark
    than he thought.
    
    Pronouncing S with the tip of the tongue makes a sibilant rather
    different from a ceceo, but obviously different from the `normal' /s/;
    so it's easy to hear it as a  lisp. In fact, the sliding of the tongue
    away from the gum/palate is so extreme in some speech (Andalucian, for
    example) that the /s/ sometimes disappears in the plural - `los buenos'
    [good people] is distinct from `lo bueno' [the principle of goodness]
    only in the quality of the /o/.

    The trait that more often catches the ear is ceceo. Historically,
    Castilian affricates usually came in pairs, with and without voicing.
    During the fifteenth century, for reasons that nobody really
    understands (although I dimly remember writing an essay called `The
    De-voicing of Medi�val Sibilants - which described the lack of
    consensus) the voicing got dropped. The colonizing of Latin America
    started while the language was in flux (on this point among others).
    The Spanish language in Latin America just went a different way
    from the European sort.

    Generally, it involves less thought, and agrees with the pronunciation
    of most Spanish-speakers, to pronounce /th/ (usually written as `z',
    sometimes `c') as S. Certainly, most people who use the name Cortez
    pronounce it /kortes/ rather then /korteth/, and _he_ probably
    pronounced it /kortedz/ - or maybe /kortets/ if he was feeling radical.

    b  ps I learnt Spanish from a Peruvian/Basque/English family and later
    in Catalunya (from, among others, an Argentinian). As a result, I get
    everything mixed up and can guarantee to pronounce anything wrong in
    any context.

    I *have* noticed that Latinoamericanos occasionally "blur" their c's and
    z's, approaching how they sound in Madrid and also that my amigos de
    Madrid *very* rarely skip the lisp.
    
    The stuff about the terminal s is interesting.  I had noticed that, but
    didn't really know what I was noticing.
    
    My favorite word to pronounce with the lisp is ciencia ficcion.
    
    Madrile�os feel that people who speak Spanish without the lisp don't 
    sound "serious".
    

    Hey there...  take it to SoapBox, eh?  This is a family notesfile!!
    
    :-)
    

.16>    Consider the Hebrew sibilants sin, shin, samekh: how does a
.16>    re-creator know how to pronounce them?

The resurrection of Hebrew did not involve recreating pronunciation.  Although
Hebrew was not anyone's "native" language, it always was used in the Jewish
liturgy, so the pronunciation of the letters was well known.  Some variation in
pronunciation did develop over almost 2000 years of Jewish dispersion around
the world, but not all that much.

    Suppose we substitute Latin for Hebrew:
    
    "Some variation in pronunciation did develop over almost 2000 years []
    around the world, but not all that much."
    
    Is this equally true?

    Is that question rhetorical?
    
    One of the concomitants of having a Latin liturgy was that, in
    priciple, one of the faithful could attend Mass anywhere in the
    world and still follow it. The principle didn't work - to such
    an extent that there was a ruling long ago that celebrants should
    pronounce Latin the way it was pronounced at the time in Rome.
    (The possibility of phonetic variations in Rome didn't seem to
    occur to anyone; but at least that rule eliminates _one_ variable.)
    
    The rule didn't work either - when I went to a French church in the
    early '60s I had difficulty making out what was going on (and as an
    altar boy [at the time] I was a stranger neither to the ritual nor to
    the Latin).
    
    In 1966 they gave up and agreed to use of the vernacular; I don't
    know what happened to the pronunciation-as-in-Rome rule.
    
    b

    As pointed out, multiple transmissions of ritual language from
    teacher to pupil don't rule out phonetic change--particularly
    if teacher and pupil share a language with different phonology
    than the ritual language, particularly when the local language
    is changing (there's a tendancy for the ritual language to have
    the same changes).
    
    The European Jews, for example, would have spoken Yiddish and
    various local languages.   If Hebrew had some feature that those
    languages didn't support, how many teacher-pupil transitions
    do you think it would survive?  (E.g. retroflex consonants,
    laryngeal fricatives, tones, "creaked" vowels, voiceless vowels,
    non-vocalic syllables).  It's likely that the pupil would map
    the "correct" sound into the local language's phonetic space
    and the teacher might well not notice the difference.
    
    Sanskrit phonology was preserved partly because the preservers
    carefully wrote out the articulations.  Well, we think it was
    preserved: absent a tape-recording in a jar in a cave, we're 
    never going to know for sure about the sound of ancient languages,
    or anything else before sound recording.
    
    		-John Bishop

    John,
    
    You mean "The East European Jews ... would have spoken Yiddish ..."
                  ^^^^
    since the West European Jews (the Sephardim) spoke something else
    whose-name-I-knew-but-it-escapes-me-now, and the Jews in Arab countries
    had a third.  Presumably, .26 meant that the divergence of the three
    was not that great (and that it was assumed that not all variations
    had zoomed off in the same wrong direction).
    
    							Ann B.

re .30:

The Sephardim were originally on the Iberian peninsula and spoke Ladino,
which is sort of a Spanish dialect using Hebrew orthography.  They were
expelled from Spain and Portugal about 500 years ago and settled in North
Africa, the Middle East, Holland, and North America among other places.

There is also a form of Farsi written with Hebrew script.

I don't know of any differences in the pronunciations of shin, sin and samekh
among different groups of Jews, but there are a number of other letters that
have different pronunciations.  Modern Hebrew pretty much settled on the
Sephardi pronunciation.

I suspect that some of the differences between letters disappeared long ago.
There are disagreements in the Talmud regarding the spelling of certain words.

    Of course, the variety of pronunciations of Hebrew in ancient times
    might have been as great as the variety of pronunciations of English
    in modern England, whatever you call the language[s] in Spain, all the
    dialects in China, etc.  Perhaps they have been forced recently to
    consolidate on a smaller number of accents rather than diversifying at all.
    
    I didn't know that there were disagreements in the Talmud regarding
    spellings, but heard that it gives some absurd explanations.  By way of
    analogy, since the English word "colour" is spelled with a letter that
    doesn't have to be there, it must mean texture as well as [color], right?
    
    -- Norman Diamond

.29>                  -< Ritual is no guarantee of preservation >-
.29>
.29>    As pointed out, multiple transmissions of ritual language from
.29>    teacher to pupil don't rule out phonetic change--particularly
.29>    if teacher and pupil share a language with different phonology
.29>    than the ritual language, particularly when the local language
.29>    is changing (there's a tendancy for the ritual language to have
.29>    the same changes).

True.  But in the case of ritual Hebrew, the primary "local languages" were
Arabic and Germanic, which have very different phonologies.  So the Hebrew
pronunciation of Germany and North Africa, to the extent that there was a
common pronunciation, probably goes back to the Hebrew of the Second Temple
period.

How much divergence occurred in Hebrew pronunciation over 2000 years?  Well,
there are some accents that I have trouble understanding.  On the other hand, I
sometimes have just as much trouble understanding English (my native language)
spoken with a Scottish accent.  And this divergence in English has taken place
over a much shorter period.

With Chinese, while the written language is mutually intelligible, the spoken languages 
have diverged to the point where they are mutually unintelligible. Of Chinese doesn't 
have a phonetic alphabet.

Korean was written using Chinese characters using a system called Idu. It wasn't until 
the late fifteenth century that the Korean phonetic alphabet, Hangul, was developed 
during the reign of King Sejong the Great. My impression of Idu is that it was in some 
ways a similar force-fit along the lines of the Minoan Linear B script used to encode 
Greek on Crete. The mapping left a lot to the reader's knowledge of the intended 
language.

Wook

>      <<< Note 1068.34 by RUMOR::WOOKPC::LEE "Wook  like book with a W" >>>
>                -< Spoken Divergence versus Written Divergence >-
>
>    With Chinese, while the written language is mutually intelligible, the
>    spoken languages  have diverged to the point where they are mutually
>    unintelligible. Of Chinese doesn't  have a phonetic alphabet.
>
>    Korean was written using Chinese characters using a system called Idu.
>    It wasn't until  the late fifteenth century that the Korean phonetic
>    alphabet, Hangul, was developed  during the reign of King Sejong the
>    Great. My impression of Idu is that it was in some  ways a similar
>    force-fit along the lines of the Minoan Linear B script used to encode 
>    Greek on Crete. The mapping left a lot to the reader's knowledge of the
>    intended  language.
>
>Wook
    

    Newsgroups: alt.fan.hofstadter,alt.religion.kibology,news.groups
    From: [email protected] (Lee Rudolph)
    Subject: TLA: not self-referential
    Message-ID: <[email protected]>
    Keywords: fluid dynamics, Tlatelolco, Nahuatl, axolotl
    Lines: 15
    Organization: Clark University (Worcester, MA)
    Date:  4 Nov 93 01:42:04 GMT
    
    When I worked in Spain, I confirmed what I'd always been taught--
    the (Castilian) Spanish alphabet counts as letters (e.g., for
    purposes of alphabetization) several digraphs, notably ch and ll.
    
    When I worked in Mexico, I observed that (Mexican) Spanish appears
    to have another such letter, namely, tl (the first letter of the
    word for hardware store, the last letter of the word for mudpuppy)--
    pronounced a bit like a Welsh ll, which is not a Spanish ll.
    
    It seems to follow that, at least in Mexico, this damned TLA which
    people are bruiting about (most recently in an attempt either to
    throw water on, or to flame, one version of a proposed name for
    a proposed fluid-dynamics group) isn't the witty bit of self-reference
    they think it is: TLA isn't a TLA, it's only a TLA.
    
    Lee Rudolph

Armenian basically has the Latin problem also.  Church Armenian, known as
Kuhr-a-par (or written word),  is very difficult to understand for most Western
Armenians.  You recognize the nouns and the verb roots but the endings are 
"different".  During Soviet domination,  after WWI, when the school systems
were rebuilt, the only books that existed in Armenia proper were the church
books.  So in Armenia, they speak something that is very close to the
Kuhr-a-par and we call it Eastern Armenian.  Some examples of this:

   "What are you seeing?"   
       (Eastern Armenian) Eench desnoum-es?
       (Western Armenian) Eench g'desnas

   "Where are you going?"
       (EA) Oor ehrtoom-es
       (WA) Oor g'ehrtas

There is also the 3 d's 3 p's and three "ch"'s.  In EA  the three letters are
soft d, hard d, and t.  In WA the distinction is lost between the soft d and
the t.  However in EA the distinction is very clear.  For example the 
name David is spelled the same in for both:

            soft d, -ah -v -ee -T

    In western armenian this is Tahveet    
    In eastern armenian it is more like   Dahveet 

the soft d sounds like someone cutting off the sound of a D too soon.


with p's you have a soft b and hard B and a P sounds.  Again the Soft P and
the B seem to be interchangable in Western armenian but  in Eastern Armenian
as well as in Church you will note a difference.

    For example the word for holy:

                 Soor -soft p

         In WA it is soorp  with a p at the end
         In church it is  soorb 

et cetera...